Messages of transformation came staccato style Friday inside the Wentworth Education Center on the San Joaquin County Office of Education campus.

The audience: 200 teenagers, many of them foster youths, and dozens of professionals in child welfare, probation and education.

They were told, in the words of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, that they, too, can be a rose in the concrete.

Stockton City Councilman Michael Tubbs, who welcomed the young people, used Shakur's 1989 poem to illustrate how excuses are just that - excuses - and how everyone has the capacity to rise above their obstacles.

"You can overcome all the reasons why others think you can't succeed," the 22-year-old Tubbs said. "It's hard to grow from concrete. It's not fair. It's not easy.

"It's harder to do right than wrong. It's harder to achieve than to fail. In spite of it all, you can achieve anyway."

Tubbs and three other speakers told their life stories as part of the sixth annual Anti-Violence Symposium hosted by the Office of Education's Foster Youth and Homeless Services educational advocacy program.

The event was held against the backdrop of Stockton's multiple challenges of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, violence and academic underachievement.

For keynote speakers Derek Clark of San Leandro and Daniel Longoria of Visalia, music helped them make necessary connections to sustain their lives and succeed.

"I don't want to give up on my life," Clark sang, using self-written lyrics to describe his personal despair after years of humiliation, abuse and foster care.

In high school, Clark was a rapper. Music was an outlet for bottled-up fury. "I was Diamond D. I got my anger out through rap." Years of clarinet playing, pushed by his foster mother, gave him an unusual advantage.

"I was a 6-5 white guy who could rap with tongue twists and then I added reggae style," Clark said. "Kids were saying, 'This white boy is fun.' "

Longoria used music differently - to prop him up at his life's lowest point.

After a childhood of neglect and emotional upheaval, he turned to gangs, substance abuse, criminal activity and pride at being incarcerated with "my heroes."

Between the ages of 12 and 30, he spent just two years outside the prison system. Substance abuse always sent him back. He was locked up at Corcoran, Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, Soledad and Pelican Bay.

He took part in 43 prison yard fights one year. That put him inside a cage - "a hole inside the hole." He fought the awful loneliness by remembering the music played by an elementary school teacher.

When Longoria was 8, he was already in trouble ("I had three tattoos before I was 6").

Alan Hammond, a teacher at Jefferson Elementary School in Lindsay, reached out and invited the troubled young boy into his home. Hammond played John Denver songs on his guitar.

Longoria, the gangster, fought off his demons inside the cage by singing the lyrics to Denver's 1971 hit, "Take Me Home, Country Roads."

Neither speaker's troubles ended until each realized that his anger was misplaced and getting him nowhere.

For both, caring relationships over time held the answers.

Clark was an unwanted baby and toddler. He was abandoned by his father and abused by his stepfather. He spent 13 years in the Alameda County foster-care system. A psychological report when he was 6 said he was "not adoptable ... a terror ... delusional ... functioning as a 21/2 year old." It also said he had mental deficiencies.

It was a foster family in a rural, unincorporated part of Hayward that finally connected with him, stuck with him during his rough teenage years, and, when he turned 18, finally convinced him to go to counseling.

Deaths of four people close to him, three of them violent tragedies in the preceding 18 months, opened him up to help. The counseling worked as Clark finally realized his self-value.

"You are not your labels," Clark said. "Every kid is worthy of love."

Longoria had his epiphany at Pelican Bay State Prison. It was a simple nod of the head from other inmates that reversed his course. The nod came during a walk of prisoners. It represented respect.

"I went back to my cell. I went, 'Yeah. This is big. I made it. I felt special.' Then I thought: Is this all there is? A nod from a couple of old guys? It all sunk in at that moment. I finally got it. You can't buy or do anything outside prison with that respect."

Clark, 46, has become an accomplished author (six books), songwriter and worldwide motivational speaker. He is married and has four children.

Longoria, 46, who has founded a fitness center since his release, is assistant program director of the Exeter-based Courage to Change program, which provides intervention for at-risk teenagers. He, too, is in demand as an inspirational speaker.